Word: gumbo
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Southerners also enjoy a legacy of shared celebration. From the epicurean crab feasts of Maryland's Eastern Shore to a catfish fry in Tennessee, from Texan barbecue orgies to the days-long shrimp or gumbo feasts of Louisiana's Cajun country, Southerners are united in their love of a party-and its morning-after reconstruction. An old New Orleans saying: "The rabbit says, 'Drink everything, eat everything, but don't tell everything...
...Southern cuisine arrived by ship or afoot from many climes. Slaves came from Africa bearing benne (sesame seed), okra, yams and remembered formulas that were to become the masterworks of Southern cuisine. Frenchmen marched ashore to reincarnate such classic dishes as bouillabaisse, which is a culinary cousin of gumbo, a permissive potpourri that can include chicken, turkey, ham, crab, oyster, shrimp or anything else on hand. While New Englanders learned-belatedly-to raise beef and sheep, Southerners derived sustenance from the wild game and pigs and chickens that were raised almost as members of the family...
Many plants already in cultivation could be better used to increase food supplies. Spiros Constantinides of the University of Rhode Island has suggested that okra-whose viscid green pods provide the distinctive ingredient in gumbo dishes-could become an important source of protein if cooks would use its ripe seeds as well as its tasty pods. Researchers with the National Academy of Sciences have been studying a protein-rich "winged bean" that grows in New Guinea and Southeast Asia, and believe it could be successfully introduced into other warm rainy areas where the principal crops-yams, cassava, potatoes...
...novel Reed calls this savory cultural mess of lore and history "the Gumbo"-after the unique and varied Creole dish. But Reed's Gumbo is strongly metaphorical rather than explicitly edible, a sort of royal soul food manufactured at the Solid Gumbo Works by a black capitalist named Ed Yellings. The plot, full of violence, intrigue and high-speed travel, turns on whether the Gumbo Works will be controlled by LaBas' forces of good and healing magic (Gumbo can cure heroin addiction) or the perversion of the ancient mysteries led by the Louisiana Red Corp. and its sinister...
...obviously found the multicultural gumbo of California ideal for developing a fiction in which facts, academic speculations and just plain jive freely cohabit. The overall effect in Louisiana Red is thoroughly disarming. His approach to the novel is not unlike a Dixieland band's approach to music: a native American diversity that adds up to a unified style-authentic and endlessly fresh. -R.Z. Sheppard